Very Bad Men by Harry Dolan Page A

skin.
    â€œNow, Rosalie—” the nanny said.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” said Rosalie Bell to Elizabeth. “Is Sutton all right?”
    An edge of panic in her voice. Elizabeth stepped close and spoke to her calmly.
    â€œI need to find him. Do you know where he is?”
    â€œHe’s working tonight.”
    â€œI tried him at work—” the nanny began, but Elizabeth raised a hand to quiet her.
    â€œI understand he left the clinic early,” Elizabeth said.
    Rosalie Bell shook her head impatiently. “I’m not talking about the clinic. He had a gig at the Art Fair tonight.”
    A jingling of bracelets as the nanny touched her fingers to her chin. “Oh, of course.”
    Elizabeth ignored her and focused on Rosalie Bell. “Maybe you could fill me in. I thought your husband was a nurse practitioner.”
    â€œThat’s his day job,” the woman said. “But he’s also in a band called the Chrome Horsemen. They play covers of Bob Dylan songs.”
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    ANTHONY LARK HELD a glass of ice against his forehead. Condensation ran down the surface of the glass and into the gauze wrapped around his left hand. He drew a breath, and most of what he took in was smoke.
    A cardboard coaster on the bar in front of him bore a logo like a billiard ball: the number eight within a white circle, with a larger circle of black around it. The Eightball Saloon. Music played upstairs, in a club called the Blind Pig. Loud music with a thumping rhythm that was starting to find its way to a spot behind Lark’s eyes.
    From his seat at the end of the bar, Lark could survey the room. Two pool tables dominated the space, green rectangles illuminated by a smoky haze of yellow light. The light came from fixtures hung on long chains suspended from the ceiling. Both tables were in use, but Lark had his eyes on the closer one, where four men in their thirties were playing doubles. They wore jeans and T-shirts. One of them was clean-shaven, but the others sported varying degrees of stubble.
    The clean-shaven one was Sutton Bell.
    An hour ago they had finished their set, broken down their equipment, and hauled it to a van in a parking structure nearby. Lark had thought they might go their separate ways, but they had stayed together and he had followed them here, to this dive on First Street, safely out of range of the tourists at the Art Fair.
    And now Bell leaned over the table to shoot the seven in the corner, and the others hooted when the ball sank into the pocket. They drank beer from longneck bottles.
    Lark set his glass on the coaster and tried to get the attention of the bartender, a twentysomething guy with a pierced eyebrow. But he was at the other end of the bar putting a cosmopolitan down in front of a woman who looked like she could be a lawyer or a real estate agent.
    She was nicely put together in a charcoal gray skirt that probably came with a matching blazer, but she wasn’t wearing the blazer. She was wearing a tailored silk blouse with pearl buttons—three of them undone. Wavy brown hair with blond highlights. Smooth forehead, pert nose, alluring mouth.
    She was on her second cosmopolitan now and once in a while she turned to look around the room—with particular attention to Bell and his friends. Maybe she knew them, Lark thought, or maybe she had seen them play and thought it might be fun to hook up with a musician.
    The bartender took Lark’s glass and brought it back filled with rum and Coke. Reaching for his wallet, Lark felt a sharp pain in his hand. It had started to swell beneath the gauze.
    Things had gone less than smoothly at Henry Kormoran’s apartment. Lark had gone there in the daylight and Kormoran had opened the door for him readily enough. But nothing’s ever easy—something his father used to say—and though he had brought along the tire iron, it was nothing like the old man, Charlie Dawtrey. Kormoran had managed to